The invention relates to a method for training a speech recognition system to a multi-item repertoire, said method comprising the steps of:
presenting a speech item by a user person; PA1 asserting distinctivity of said presented speech item in said repertoire; PA1 under control of a distinctivity found inserting said presented speech item into the repertoire; PA1 repeating these steps until reaching sufficiency of the repertoire. Speech recognition has become a commercially hot subject, that finds application in highly sophisticated professional systems, but also in bottom-line consumer gadgets and devices. A particular instance of the latter are portable telephones; certain such devices are controllable by speech that may represent digits, standard telephone expressions such as voice commands like connect, stop, terminate, hold, and further relevant words and phrases. Other applicable speech items may be personal names, firm names, and words like boss, wife and secretary, to thus enable speeded-up or abbreviated dialling. Of course, similar vocabularies find application in other languages. It has been found that in particular the use of such largely unconstrained terms may create a great deal of confusion. For example, certain names may have a likeness to each other. Also, certain names may sound like said standard terms or voice commands, even when the spelling we different. For example, wife may be difficult to distinguish from five, the Dutch word Ach or Agt (eight) is in use both as a family name, and as the name of a village. Further confusion between recognized words may occur in a cross-language situation, where a person uses words from different languages such as PA1 distinctivity asserting means of said presented speech item in said repertoire; PA1 inserting means for under control of a distinctivity found by said distinctivity asserting means inserting said presented speech item into the repertoire; PA1 repeat control means for repeating these steps until reaching sufficiency of the repertoire, PA1 and telephone functionality means having control input means fed by an output of said speech recognition system for receiving control data recognized from received speech items in a non-training state,
one (English, 1)--wann (German, when?) PA0 sept (French, 7)--set (English) PA0 huit (French, 8)--wie (German, how?) PA0 dix (French, 10)--this (English)
In consequence, a need has been recognized for maintaining the stored repertoire, i.e., a set of recognized speech expressions or utterances, in such a manageable way that the probability for confusion remains minimal, given the actual performance of the system in question. European Patent Application EP 601 876 discloses a system wherein a new phrase or utterance that would cause confusion with a previously is blocked from being stored.